Versailles,07 March 2016. Recently this year, the French Council of Ministers named Philippe Schleicher as Chairman and CEO of the GIAT Industries Group and of its subsidiary Société Nationale des Poudres et Explosifs (SNPE). Under this appointment, he also becomes Chairman of Eurenco. A Sciences Po and HEC graduate, Philippe Schleicher, aged 61, joined the Snecma Group, now Safran, in 1980.

He spent the first 15 years of his career developing the carbon-carbon composite brake activity for aeronautical application, which became one of the Group’s most valuable activities. In 1995, he joined the SNPE Group as Chairman and CEO of Nobel Sport, the subsidiary specialising in hunting ammunition and propellants. In the early 2000s, he worked on taking over automated production line engineering companies in the food processing industry, through LBOs with financial partners.

He returned to work for the Safran Group in 2004 and became Managing Director of Techspace Aero, the Group’s Belgian subsidiary. In 2011, he came back to France to finalise the Herakles project which had been set up to merge the missile/rocket propulsion activities of SNPE and Safran. He was named CEO of Herakles in 2012.